Nintendo has kept online services for its 3DS and Wii U consoles running several years after these left the market. Let’s remember that the successor to the beloved and still remembered Nintendo Wii was a bad experience for the company and its users in general, and that the life cycle of the 3DS extended longer than originally expected, both of which caused the company’s numbers to not be at their best in the middle of the last decade.

Thus, in 2017 the death of the Wii U was officially announced and three years later the same happened with the 3DS family, of course, both movements took place when Nintendo had already started to write a new success story with the Switch, which hit the market in March 2017 and whose successor we expect in the first quarter of 2025, eight years after the debut of the current generation of the company, which, as you well know, remains out of the generation war between Microsoft and Sony.

Thus, with the fall of both predecessors, we learned at the beginning of 2022 that Nintendo’s plans included the closure of the online stores of both consoles in March of last year due to said closure. However, although from this point on it was no longer possible to obtain new games (but it was possible to download previously purchased ones), Nintendo decided to keep the rest of the online services running on both consoles.

Last weekend to enjoy online gaming on Wii U and 3DS https://t.co/SgyoreHbZ4

— Wario64 (@Wario64) April 5, 2024

However, the deadline It is donethat Tomorrow, Monday, April 8, Nintendo will “shut down” the entire 3DS and Wii U online services infrastructure, so players will no longer be able to play online, communicate with their contacts, or any other function that depends on an internet connection through the company’s servers. The closures come four and seven years after their launch.

We can imagine the numbers to support this infrastructure don’t add up as there won’t be too many users still using these consoles. Just two hours ago, in news about the team dedicated to preserving Xbox classics, I reminded you that Microsoft will close the Xbox 360 store in June of this year, almost 20 years after its launch, eight after Microsoft discontinued it (although its successor debuted three years earlier, in 2013). So it seems that This year, 2024, is the year of saying goodbye to some truly memorable consoles.